Living in an analog Japan

I was asked by many people to expand on my post on reaching 30 years in Japan, so I thought I would do a deeper dive on each point. Here is the first one on what it meant to have an analog start to my life in Japan.

I arrived in Japan in the summer of 1994 with a Berlitz language guide, a pocket Japanese/English dictionary, a few rudimentary words of greeting in Japanese, and a huge dose of naivety.

The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program is truly a marvelous program, started in 1987 by the Ministry of Education to increase internationalization in Japan, particularly rural areas. And my area could not have been much more rural. I had to look it up on the map (a paper one) and it appeared as a small island off the main island of Honshu, accessible only by ferry. I couldn't pinch out to see it better, nor take a virtual tour using Streetview...I just had to go on faith that it would be habitable.

The JET program holds its arrival orientation in Shinjuku, one of the busiest districts in Tokyo, at the Keio Plaza Hotel, where roughly 1000 JETs came together for intro seminars and networking. We gradually got into our smaller groups according to our regions, mine in Hiroshima Prefecture. This was a group of maybe 100 people.

At the end of orientation, we boarded the Shinkansen (bullet train) towards Hiroshima (the airport had not yet been completed) and one-by-one people got off at their respective stops along the way to Hiroshima city **fun fact, Hiroshima Pref. has the most Shinkansen stops of any Prefecture in Japan - five

When we arrived at Hiroshima Station, we were down to the final 15 or so of us and we were greeted by people holding signs with our names; that is, except for the pair apparently waiting for me, as I was the last one left for pick-up. They brought me to a car and spoke in the most stilted English, while I whiffled through the Berlitz language guide to find anything that would help in conversation. **fun fact, Berlitz language guide was good at helping you ask the question, but not understand the answers!

Finally, having taken a high speed train, a car, a ferry, and then the car again, we arrived at my apartment next to the school, in a town of less than 1000, based at a middle school with 60 students. The English teacher was a Japanese guy who had learned a lot of his English from reading J.D. Salinger and had no use for an unqualified native English teaching assistant other than to play the role of human tape recorder; a typical class would have me come up with him, listen to each student recite a line from their required text and then Sueda-sensei would turn to me and ask who pronounced it best? He would then have me read it out (even saying "can you make it sound more American?") before telling me to go back to the teachers' room...where I would sit until the next class and repeat.

This left me a lot of time for me to play with my IBM Thinkpad laptop (I say "play" because mostly I played mine sweep if I didn't have anything I could think of to write since there was no internet). The other teachers laughed at me for using a laptop because it couldn't do Japanese characters without buying a separate module, and it couldn't print anything out without a separate serial cabled printer.

On the other hand, they had "Wapro" (Japanese word processor) that could type in Japanese or English, had an LCD screen AND could print out on thermal paper right from the machine itself!

Given how little I was actually teaching on the island, and given my background in science, I applied for an ad hoc editing role with a company based in Tokyo (still around today: Forte).

A truly analog role: I found it in the job classifieds of the Japan times, typed up my resume on my computer and printed out on my laughable serial connected printer, and faxed it to the company. They mailed me back a letter and a writing test, which I had to blow up on the photocopier from A4 to B4, write my corrections by hand in the margins, shrink it back down to A4 so I could fax it back to the company. Despite my abhorrent handwriting, they sent me a few jobs over the year, which required me to go through the same process.

In the meantime, I continued to learn Japanese through workbooks, testing out conversations in the teachers' room, playing with the kids during breaks, joining the Japanese taiko drumming group (despite my obvious rhythmic deficiencies!), and the island tennis club.

Through my experiences on the island, I took away a few learnings:

1. I wasn't a great English teacher - The answer to "why do you say it like that?" was more often than not: "I don't know; it just sounds better"
2. I was brave enough to try out Japanese even though I knew I might be laughed at. I maintained a self-reflective sense of humour and made it part of the process. In fact, even on my final day on the island, when I was feeling more confident in every day conversation, I made my Sayonara speech at the town hall. The final line of that speech was supposed to be "Minasama no koto wa kesshite wasuremasen" (I will never forget you), but instead I said "Minasama no koto wa kesshite wakarimasen" (I will never understand you) - oh so close....Instead of the tear jerking moment I thought it would be, there was silence. By the time I realized my error and quickly corrected myself, the room burst out in laughter - I suspect some people may still remember that day :-)
3. I was pretty good at understanding the science and intended meaning of Japanese researchers who wanted to submit their papers to international journals

Armed with these learnings, I decided it was time to move to Tokyo and I applied for a full time role at Forte...thus began the second phase of my Japan journey.